


Ain't No River Wide Enough

by SylvanWitch



Series: Ain't No Mountain High Enough [6]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Blood and Injury, Hospitalization, M/M, Near Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-07
Updated: 2017-11-07
Packaged: 2019-01-30 12:22:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,543
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12653448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylvanWitch/pseuds/SylvanWitch
Summary: Captain America is good at a lot of things.  Being dead isn't one of them.





	Ain't No River Wide Enough

**Author's Note:**

> This title and all the titles in the series are taken from Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell's terrific "Ain't No Mountain High Enough."

“How many times have I told you that your goody-two-shoes routine was going to come back to bite you in the ass?  No good deed goes unpunished, I said.  Of course, you being a giant fucking Boy Scout have to go around escorting old ladies across the street and, oh, yeah, _stopping bullets with your stupidly enormous but not actually bulletproof chest_.”

 

Tony might have been shouting that last part, but his throat was so hoarse from exhaustion and his vocal chords stretched so taut with caffeine that it came out a croak.

 

The camera in the corner blinked its unfeeling red eye and somewhere in the cavernous grey belly of S.H.I.E.L.D. a computer recorded every word while a faceless monitor tech kept watch over the soundless feed, deprived of drama by a quick workaround Tony had managed before he’d gotten too strung out to do much besides monologue at Steve, who couldn’t hear him either.

 

“Jesus, Cap, you have to wake up.”

 

Tony was begging, but it wasn’t the first time.

 

He’d said, “Please, please, please” as Steve’s blood had pulsed between his pressing fingers.  He’d said, “Don’t die, Steve, God fuck please don’t die,” again and again, a mantra half prayer, half curse as the EMTs had pulled him away from Steve, pushed him toward the ambulance, checked him for wounds, helped him into a seat.

 

On the ride there he’d gone inside himself, holding on to the moment before Cap had been gunned down by some lame-ass two-bit punk with a death wish and a .38.  Tony told himself if he could see Cap as he’d been in the moments before the shot, hair bronzed by the setting autumn sun, face alive with laughter, head thrown back and eyes brilliant with it—if he could remember that and only that, fixate on it, it would keep Steve alive.

 

Some part of him, the rational, scientific mind, calculated odds and explained in a monotonous drone that Steve was going to die.

 

Tony ignored that part in favor of sudden religion.

 

At the hospital, he’d been joined by Nat and Clint.  (“Bruce...can’t,” Nat had said, and Tony had understood.  Or, the real Tony would have understood.  This Tony nodded woodenly and stared at the grey shiny floor of the ER waiting room.)

 

Pepper had shown up—“My god, Tony, what happened?  Are you alright?  What can I do?”—and then Fury had swept in with murder in his eye and a series of automatic commands that even the civilians at the hospital had obeyed unthinkingly.

 

A white-coated S.H.I.E.L.D. doctor had swept by Tony in a wave of heady perfume and competence—“Dr. Addis Kent, she’s the best thoracic surgeon in the world”—and then there were a series of forms and questions that Tony couldn’t answer—why didn’t he know Steve’s mother’s maiden name?  How could he have never asked Steve about how his father had died?

 

Pepper had said, “Tony, Jarvis can do this,” and he’d blinked back to himself for a painful few minutes, feeling his heart kicking hard in his chest, panic squeezing the breath out of his lungs.  It was long enough for Tony to activate Jarvis’ remote connection on his watch and interface that with the hospital’s administrative mainframe.

 

Then Dr. Kent had emerged from the surgery wearing a stained gown and a grim look, and Tony had retreated once more into superstition and pleading.

 

But despite her prognosis—“There’s been too much damage to the tissues surrounding the heart.  I can stabilize him, keep his heart going for now, but I think you’d better prepare to let him go.”—Steve had survived the vital first twenty-four hours in the ICU and then a second surgery to repair some leakage and then transport to S.H.I.E.L.D.

 

His mighty heart had kept pumping despite the odds against him, despite Dr. Kent’s dire warnings about not putting too much stock in his better numbers, despite the increasing evidence of Tony’s own senses, suggesting that Steve was already beyond even Ironman’s farthest limits, way out beyond the galaxy’s edge, where the whole shebang folded in on itself eternally.

 

His heart was reduced to a green line on a black screen indicating its steady, unchanging progress.

 

That line should be doing the tango, Tony thought, taking Steve’s hand, raising it to his mouth, dropping a kiss on his ring finger, breathing, “Please wake up.” And then raising his head to say, “Please, Steve.  Wake up.” And then standing, shouting, “Goddamnit, soldier, wake up, that’s an order!”

 

Nothing from that treacherous green line.

 

No sign that Steve was in there.  Tony dropped back into his chair, put his head down on Steve’s arm, and refused to cry. 

 

“Please,” he whispered, resuming his mantra. 

 

*****

 

An oppressive groan woke him, though he couldn’t open his eyes.  That sound, the inhuman enormous echo of pressure—he knew it intimately, like a cold hand sifting through his guts. 

 

He was below the ice again.

 

“Tony?” he thought he said, but the weight of the water, the unbearable crushing weight pressed against his chest and strangled the words before they could take form.

 

Steve tried to move then, tried to move his hands, his arms, tried to turn his head or raise it, but he was completely immobilized, unable to feel anything at all except a sense of pressure making his ears dense with blood, muffling his own heartbeat or any sound his movements might make.

 

Was he paralyzed?  Nothing hurt, and that was worse than if it had, because if he was below the ice again, something must have happened to put him there, and whatever it was should have left a mark.

 

Unless he’d been there long enough to heal.

 

Ice filled his veins and he tried to shiver it away, but he couldn’t do even that. 

 

“Tony will find me,” he said, though no sound emerged to cut away the pressing silence.

 

“Please,” he whispered, trying not to succumb to despair, fear like a huge immovable frozen waste pushing him deeper and deeper into the lonely dark.

 

“Please.”

 

*****

 

“Tony?” 

 

Tony came awake with a start, looking first with wild surmise at Steve, who was still unconscious, unmoving, the indifferent green line making its too-regular crawl across the monitor.

 

A hand on his shoulder brought him up from his slump, and he turned to see Pepper standing there with a cup of coffee in her free hand.

 

She offered it wordlessly, and he took it without a word either, and they remained there in empty silence for the long minutes it took him to swallow the hot liquid down.

 

Then he got up stiffly, arching his back and stretching, drained cup shaking in his outstretched hand.  He looked at it suspiciously for a long minute, as if the hand didn’t belong to him, as if it couldn’t be his if it were shaking.

 

Pepper put an arm around his shoulders and turned him toward the door.

 

“You need to rest and eat, Tony.  You’re no good to Steve if you exhaust yourself into a bed next to him.”

 

Tony nodded, straining his neck around to give another look at the uniform green line.

 

Then, “Okay.”  He didn’t recognize his own voice.  When he reached up to run a hand over his mouth, he was startled to find a three-days growth of beard.  Searching further, he discovered his hair was a greasy, tangled nest.  He didn’t bother sniffing his armpits.  He knew what he must smell like.

 

Steve would hate to see him like this.  He always fussed over Tony’s laboratory habits, the way he’d neglect his diet and hygiene in pursuit of a breakthrough. 

 

“Shower,” Tony muttered, moving in a fog of denial and despair.  He let Pepper guide him to a generic tiled bathroom with the usual amenities—generic soap, shampoo in an unlabeled clear plastic bottle, bleached white towel with a faint S.H.I.E.L.D. logo embossed on the edges.

 

There were blue rubber flip-flops on the floor and a set of S.H.I.E.L.D.-issue black sweats on the wooden bench.

 

“If you need me…” Pepper began, letting the offer hang in the air between them.

 

He shook his head.  “No,” he tried to say, but only a croak emerged.  He cleared his throat and tried again.  “No, I’m good.”

 

“I’ll ask the commissary to make you something.  What would you like?”

 

Tony shrugged.  He wasn’t hungry.  Such exigencies were beyond him.

 

“I’ll take care of it,” she said then, as if he’d answered her.

 

The door closed behind her with a hollow sound that echoed in the grey room.

 

The shower floor was rough to prevent slipping, the water hot enough, the soap and shampoo cleansing.

 

There was a blankness in his brain, a place in which he resided, unattached to the world around him.  He knew that he was feeling these things, but he didn’t have any opinion about them, any thoughts about low-end soap or cheap towels or water that couldn’t be made hotter with a verbal command.

 

Some part of him had retreated this way so that he could function.  He sensed an enormity within him, a looming hugeness that threatened to obliterate his whole self, and he pretended it wasn’t there because to acknowledge it was to say, “Steve is going to die,” and saying it would make it so, and it couldn’t be.

 

A knock at the door reminded him he’d been dallying in the little shower anteroom for too long.  He slid his still-damp limbs into the clothes, leaving the old ones where they’d fallen, and slip-slapped his way out of the room with his borrowed flip-flops.

 

Pepper led him to the dim, cavernous commissary, completely empty of people, a single orange light burning over the buffet line in the kitchen area.  There was a bowl of soup on the table and a packaged dinner roll and a side dish of gluey mac-and-cheese and another cup of coffee steaming lazily in the cool, still air.

 

He dutifully sat and purposefully took in forkfuls and spoonfuls and mouthfuls, chewing, swallowing automatically, not tasting a thing.

 

He washed it down with coffee and wiped his mouth with a paper napkin and tried to slide out of the booth, intent on getting back to Steve’s bedside.

 

Pepper’s hand on his wrist stopped him, and he stared at it for long seconds before he started to sense the cold, to feel the dread rolling out from his belly, encasing his heart and his throat and his mouth in ice.

 

“Is he dead?” he managed with a Herculean effort of will.

 

“No,” Pepper hastened to say, squeezing Tony’s wrist.

 

“Then let me go,” he insisted, twisting out of her grip and rising.

 

“Tony, please, you have to get some sleep.”

 

“I sleep,” he said, thinking of the missing time he’d experienced once or twice, a sense of twilit half-awareness populated by monsters out of his past.  His father condescending to explain something to him.  He mother wafting by on a cloud of perfume and diffuse affection.  It wasn’t sleep, precisely, but it was enough.

 

“Tony,” she tried again, but he ignored her, moving implacably toward the hall, realizing only after he reached it that he didn’t quite know how to get back to Steve’s exclusive tomb.

 

“I’ll take you.”  Pepper was just there, at his elbow, as if summoned by his need, and he followed her without speaking, without even acknowledging her presence except to slide by her as she indicated the door and tried to engage him one more time in conversation.

 

He didn’t want to talk.  He wanted to breathe the same recycled air as Steve, feel the deceptive warmth of his hand, watch the inhuman green line climb and fall, climb and fall.

 

He wanted to go down into the darkness with him and bring him back up or lie down by his side and never return.

 

*****

 

Steve wasn’t getting back this time.  It wasn’t fatalism or despair.  It was an iron certainty that he took perverse comfort in.  Hard, cold truth seemed better than deceptive hope, which had proved treacherous too many times for him to count.

 

Here, there was nothing but a sense of lingering pressure, and with effort he could turn his mind from the billions of pounds of water pushing him ever deeper into the fatal darkness.

 

He knew that he wouldn’t survive it this time.  He’d die of dehydration—bad—or go mad—worse.

 

Mostly, when he allowed himself access to the feelings he was ruthlessly suppressing, Steve felt sadness.  Not for himself—he’d lived his life, done some good—but for Tony, who in Steve’s ultimate abandonment would read confirmation of his own inevitable doom.

 

Steve prayed, in his fashion, that Tony would forgive him and forget him and move on.  He prayed that Pepper would help Tony grieve without drowning his liver or driving Bruce to homicidal green rage or developing a weapon that would destroy them all.

 

Sometimes, at the end of his prayers, when the blood-pulsing quiet of his icy tomb set in, Steve would remember to pray for himself, some still, small voice saying, “Please.”

 

Mostly he ignored that voice.

 

Mostly.

 

And then one day—night—week, month, millisecond, year, hour attenuated into a series of helpless breaths

 

(why couldn’t breathing be voluntary.  Why couldn’t he just…stop.)

 

—Steve heard another voice.

 

Or an _other_ :  distant, blurred, as through a thickness of ice and a drowning span of water—indistinct but somehow

 

Irreverent?

 

“Tony?” Steve tried, but his throat still wasn’t producing sound, and anyway, he was convinced that actual sound would echo around him, bouncing infinitely and driving him crazy, the final vowel

 

_Y—Y—Y—Y—Y—Y_

 

No.

 

Eventually, Steve made out a word, maybe, something like, “Help”

 

“You”

 

Could it be…?

 

“Pal”

 

“Bucky?”

 

The voice seemed to enlarge itself to fill the crushing silence, saying, “Hey, I’m going to help you, okay, pal?”

 

“Bucky?”

 

“’course it is.  Who else’d be here to save your sorry ass?”

 

“Bucky…”

 

He’d lost all his other words.  Only the name mattered, the precious, impossible name.  Eventually, he found others, though, the ones that hit upon the only other truth Steve seemed able to grasp in the sinking deepness.

 

“You’re dead.”

 

“No, _you’re_ dead.”  Was it possible for a hallucination to sound like an eight-year-old on a playground?

 

“You fell, Buck.  I saw you fall.  I couldn’t catch you.”

 

“Lighten up, Steve.  You think you’re the only miracle guy?  Share the credit, will ya?  Geez, you and your super-ego.”

 

Teasing.  Steve was trapped in the ice and Bucky was razzing him.

 

“Jesus.”  He _was_ alive!

 

“Bucky’ll do.”

 

“Get me out of this?”

 

“Whaddya think I’m here for, my health?  It’s frickin’ freezing down here.”

 

“I missed you.”

 

“Ah, geez, has freezing made you soft?  Spare me the smarm and get your ass in gear.  I haven’t got all day.”

 

“What do you want me to do?”

 

“Open your eyes.”

 

“I can’t.”

 

“You don’t open those baby blues, we ain’t going topside, Steve-o.  Open ‘em.”

 

“I _can’t_!”

 

“Open your goddamned eyes, Steve!”

 

“Bucky?”

 

*****

 

Tony was pacing the room, arms crossed, a scowl furrowing his features and a stream of invective spewing from his lips.

 

All of it was aimed at the still figure on the bed.  Dr. Kent had been in a few minutes ago, leaving behind her a gentle suggestion that Tony needed to “see to business” and a stack of forms to fill out giving her permission to let Steve go.

 

Let him go.

 

As if Tony had ever _let_ Steve do anything.

 

“Fucking asshole!” he spat, retracing his route across the cold grey floor.  “I told you when you put my name down on those forms that this would happen, didn’t I?  Didn’t I say that it was borrowing trouble?  Practically begging the universe to fuck us over.  Well, here’s what you didn’t figure on, Mr. Always Prepared--I’m not going to let you go, Steve, so you’d better just open your goddamned eyes.  You hear me?  Open your goddamned eyes, Steve!”

 

This last was shouted into the clay mask that had replaced Steve’s face. This close, Tony could see droplets of his spittle beading on the ashen, cool skin.

 

And then the death mask blinked.

 

Simultaneously, every monitor in the room screed into alarming life, the hated green line getting its exercise as Steve’s damaged heart kicked into higher gear.

 

Tony took Steve’s hand and said, “Steve?”

 

No response.  The blue eyes were fixed on something at a distance, cloudy and unfocused; Tony had seen that look before:  It was the expression men wore when they were dying.

 

“Steve, c’mon, you’ve got to come all the way back.  You’ve got to come back to me.  Come back to me, Steve.”

 

 Steve began to move his lips, and there might have been sound coming out, but the hysterical machines wouldn’t let Tony hear him, so with a brutal economy of motion, he turned toward the wall and ripped the power cord from the socket.

 

Blessed quiet fell upon them, punctuated by the rapid approach of feet outside the door.

 

“Jarvis, door,” Tony ordered.  The footsteps would be replaced with frantic pounding in short order, so with the precious seconds they had left, Tony leaned over his lover, took his face in both hands, and kissed him.

 

When he pulled a little away, Tony was gratified to see awareness in Steve’s eyes.

 

“Steve?” he whispered, “You with me?”

 

“Bucky?” Steve replied.

 

*****

 

When the door had opened, a buzzing mass of white coats and blue scrubs had swarmed into the room, and Tony had let himself be pushed back toward the far wall, out of the way of the carts and gesticulations and astonished gawkers of the medical variety.

 

Dr. Kent established order with a sharp word, and eventually everyone filed out murmuring, leaving only the good doctor and Tony and a befuddled Steve, who looked somehow small under her stern, assessing gaze.

 

“There are apparently things about you that don’t appear in the files, Captain Rogers.”

 

Then she introduced herself and spent several minutes explaining things, minutes in which Tony lost a little time.  He may have fallen asleep standing up.  His last semi-coherent thought had been about how Bruce would have been handy to have around as a translator.  Then someone was touching his arm gently and saying his name.

 

For a confused moment, he thought it was Steve, but his eyes showed him otherwise—Steve across the room still a little pale but sitting up in the hospital bed—and eventually he made them focus on Dr. Kent, who was giving him an impatient look.

 

“Do I need to commit you for observation, Mr. Stark?”

 

He snorted not at all politely and started to say, “Jarv— .”

 

“Tony,” Steve said, fond admonishment clear in his voice.

 

“Fine.”  Still, he let his eyes linger on the ceiling for a pointed period of seconds before he finally lowered them to look the doctor in the eyes.

 

“Captain Rogers needs a series of tests, so we’re taking him to another wing.  You should use the opportunity to get something to eat and perhaps get some sleep too.”

 

The watch on his wrist—a smarter watch, as he thought of it—informed him that he’d been in the hospital six days, that it was 3:00 in the afternoon of a grey and rainy day, that it was 50 degrees outside, and that they were serving meatloaf in the commissary starting at 4:00pm.

 

“Give us a minute,” he said, not asking, and walked past Dr. Kent as though she’d already left the room.

 

“Tony,” Steve said, this time with more admonishment and less fondness.

 

“Oh, please, like you have any room to talk to me about polite behavior.  You d-died, Steve.”  He’d been alright until those last few words. 

 

Steve made a noise, a broken little sound, and held his hand out for Tony to take. Even as he watched, the bruises where Steve had had a cannula began to fade.

 

He closed his hand over Steve’s, squeezing, and pulled his chair closer to the bedside so that he could lay his head against Steve’s arm—carefully—and rest his eyes and his clenching heart and his exhaustion and fear and anger.

 

“I’m sorry,” Steve whispered, and there was strain in it, for the next moment Tony felt Steve’s other hand in his hair, which meant he was probably pulling on his stitches, and Tony should say something, but he didn’t have the energy.

 

Besides, it felt good to have Steve stroking his hair, touching him behind the ear, raising shivers.

 

“I love you,” Steve said, strained further, and Tony sat up and leaned over him to plant a silencing kiss on his open mouth.

 

It deepened into something desperate and needful and wholly inappropriate, and if it hadn’t been for the treacherous hectic beeping of the heartrate monitor, Tony might have climbed onto the bed and done something even more unseemly.

 

As it was, when he finally pulled away and sat back, Steve’s face was flushed, his lips rouged and panting, and his chin a little raw from beard burn.

 

“Don’t die again.”

 

“Yes, sir.”

 

“And don’t call me ‘Bucky.’”

 

*****

 

Steve felt the color drain from his face, even as he managed a half-articulated, “What?”

 

He sounded like his pre-serum self, voice up some octaves and quavering, and he realized his mistake when Tony’s eyes narrowed in that way they got that meant he was on to something interesting, and he wasn’t going to stop pursuing it until he had an answer.

 

Steve loved to see it when it was aimed at a computer model.  He liked it less when he was under the beam of Tony’s laser focus.

 

“When you first came out of your—.”  Here, Tony dismissed the last six endless days of trauma with a _we-won’t-talk-about-this-later_ hand-wave—“you called me Bucky.”

 

Tony’s words triggered a cascade of millisecond memories, fragmented snapshots of where he’d been when he hadn’t been here.

 

He tried to cover how it shook him to remember Bucky’s voice, his words, inflection, tone—all of it so real, so much like his best friend that he felt a deep ache in his chest that had nothing to do with physical damage and everything to do with a broken heart.

 

“I know the story in the files, Cap, but I gotta say, your reaction right now suggests there was a lot left out of the official report on James Buchanan Barnes.”

 

Steve swallowed, feeling the ache turn to a squirming in his belly that slithered up his throat and threatened to make him sick.

 

“It—,” he tried, but he had to clear his throat, and when he continued, his voice was hoarser, and he didn’t sound at all convincing.  “It’s not what you think.”  But he couldn’t look at Tony when he said it, and he knew he was digging a deeper hole for himself.  Why couldn’t he just shut up?  Or better yet, tell Tony the truth? 

 

What difference did it make that he’d carried a painful torch for his best friend all those decades and lifetimes ago?  Bucky was dead.  And Tony was standing beside him, searching his face, looking for some way of understanding what Steve was trying to say.

 

Steve felt Tony take his hand.

 

“I think you loved Bucky in a way you had to keep secret, even from him.  And I think in those hours in the cold and dark, he came back to you.”

 

Steve did look at Tony then, astonished and alarmed at once, and Tony chuckled, though it wasn’t an entirely happy sound.

 

“You don’t think I relived my worst regrets when I was in my own dark, cold place?”  Tony touched the arc reactor reflexively, and Steve’s eyes tracked the movement and then looked back up into Tony’s face.

 

Tony’s expression was raw, remembered sorrow etched deeper by the physical toll Steve’s condition had obviously taken on him over the long vigil he’d kept.

 

“Who’d you regret?” Steve asked softly, squeezing Tony’s hand, inviting his confidence, his trust.

 

But Tony shook his head, “It’s not about me,” he deflected, squeezing back.  “And besides, if I don’t let you get some rest, the doc’s going to have me committed.”

 

“Maybe she should.  Do you promise you’ll get some sleep?”

 

Tony bridled visibly.  “I sleep!”

 

Steve reached up to brush the tips of his fingers gently over the dark bags under Tony’s eyes. 

 

“I did.”  But it was weaker, less outraged.  Then, “I will,” defeated.

 

“But don’t think I’ve forgotten the Bucky thing.  We’ll talk, okay?”

 

Behind the bravado, Steve heard something else, something uncertain and worried.  It tugged painfully at his already aching heart, and he whispered, “Hey, c’mere,” pulling on Tony’s hand to get him to bend closer.

 

“I love you, Tony.”  And he waited, eyes fixed on Tony’s, which drew closer until he had to close his eyes at the love he saw returned there and the feel of Tony’s lips on his own and the smell of him, his weight against Steve’s shoulder a brief promise of later, when Tony could hold him down and kiss him everywhere.

 

“I love you, too,” Tony answered.

 

There was an imperious knock on the door, and it opened, Dr. Kent giving Tony a decidedly unfriendly look.

 

“Visiting hours are over, Mr. Stark.  You can see Captain Rogers in,” she made a show of consulting her watch, “eight hours.”

 

Tony opened his mouth to protest but closed it again when Steve said, “Tony, it’s alright.  I’m alright.  I’ll see you in a while.”  Steve weighted the promise with a final squeeze before letting go of Tony’s hand.

 

“Later, alligators,” Tony said breezily, moving toward the door, at which he stopped, half-turning to add, “I’ll bring you a Nathan’s.”

 

“Bring six!” Steve called after him, over Dr. Kent’s tsk of disapproval.

 

“He loves me,” Steve explained, beaming at her. 

 

“He does,” she agreed, face all business, though she seemed to be having to work some to keep a smile off of it.

 

“I’m lucky,” he added, levering his legs over the bed as an intern came in pushing a wheelchair to take him for his tests.

 

“Yes,” she said, drawing out the word.  “More than I can account for, in fact.  Your heart shouldn’t have healed the way it did, Captain.”

 

“Well, heck, that’s easy to explain, Doc.”

 

“Oh?”

 

“Yeah.  It’s not _my_ heart.  And _his_ hearts, as you know, can’t be stopped by plain old metal.”

 

“I don’t think it works that way,” she said, but she was smiling now for real, all pretense of sternness gone.

 

Steve shrugged, smiling back at her.  “You’re the doc, Doc.”

 

But Steve knew that all the tests at S.H.I.E.L.D.’s considerable command wouldn’t reveal what he believed without having to look at all:  He was alive because Tony Stark loved him, and there wasn’t a cure of any kind to top that.


End file.
